NYCPHP Meetup

[John Campbell]

> After some extensive googling I found that the ISO codes are crap omitting
> about 80% of the langauges spoken in the world. That is why SIL created a new
> list, which is obviously way larger and uses three letter codes. Both lists
> are published and free to use (as far as I can tell), but both fail to list
> the languages in their native names. So for someone who doesn't speak English
> these lists are useless. In any case, the complete list is available here:
> http://www.ethnologue.com/codes/

What are you trying to do?  If this is for translating software, just
use ISO 639-1 (language) + ISO 3166-1 (country).  If you attempt to
use ISO 639-3 it will be a huge mess.  ISO 639-1 may exclude 80% of
the "known" languages, but it covers 99.99% of the computer using
population.  It is also the format included in the "Accept-Language"
HTTP header.  The problem with ISO 639-3 is that it includes things
like 60 different Arabic dialects, but there is only one "software"
version of Arabic.

Regards,
John Campbell